In 1971, the Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon (1934-2005) published an article in the French magazine Preuves, reflecting on his artistic influences. Interestingly, he did not begin his article with a reflection on art, but on architecture. He wrote: ‘Architecture appealed to me. Even today, I think it’s the most important, the most complete, the most necessary art’.[1] Although architecture was – as this dissertation will further reveal – a significant factor in the artist’s personal life as well as in his oeuvre, this has not been previously addressed, nor investigated. This dissertation aims to make a start to that investigation. 

Folon, a Belgian artist who spent his life living in France, was mostly known for his drawings, watercolour paintings, screenprints and – later in his life – his sculptures. Although he was an internationally renowned artist, with monographic exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Italy and other countries, the academic discourse on the artist today remains rather limited. Most posthumous publications so far are published by the monographic museum in La Hulpe, today known as the Fondation Folon, which Folon established himself in 2000. Examples are Folon. Sculpture (2020), Folon and Olivetti (2024), published for an exhibition on his collaborative projects with the Italian Olivetti company and Folon/Magritte (2024), the exhibition catalogue for a temporary exhibition on the similarities between both artists in the Magritte Museum in Brussels. From the field of academia, there are not many publications on the artist thus far. There is the publication L’etica della poesia, published for an exhibition on Folon in The Vatican which has contributions by art critics such as Claudio Strinati and Micol Forti. Furthermore, the Italian art historian Marilena Pasquali has covered the work of Folon in a few publications. Since Folon was a Belgian living in France, mostly successful in the United States, Italy and Japan, it’s difficult to root his legacy in just one specific country. Consequently, – and probably also due to the remoteness of the Fondation Folon, only reachable by car – not all Belgians today have heard of the artist. Although his work definitely relates to the earlier Belgian surrealist movement, Folon remains more widely celebrated abroad, such as in Japan, where a large retrospective exhibition is travelling from Tokyo to Nagoya and Osaka in 2024 and 2025. 

Born on the outskirts of Brussels, Folon moved to Paris when he was 21 years old. Interestingly, he studied architecture in high school. He did not enjoy the rigid and conservative way architecture was taught at the school. After graduating high school, he decided to study the newly established degree in Industrial Design at La Cambre Superior Institute of Decorative Arts, founded by renowned art nouveau and modernist architect Henry Van de Velde. Ultimately, Folon would stay at La Cambre for no longer than six months. In March 1955 he packed his bags and hitchhiked to Paris, hoping to make it as an artist in the glorious Ville Lumière. Folon thus never became an architect. He did not hold a degree in architecture and he never practiced the profession. However, throughout his artistic career, he presented himself as an architect. Although he only studied at La Cambre for six months, in multiple interviews over the years he claimed he held an architecture degree from the school.[2]  This is a falsehood. Folon, not an architect, wanted everyone to think he had enjoyed a respected modernist architectural education. 

As the archival research in this dissertation will reveal, his relationship with architecture resurfaces in many forms in his life and work. Yet, this has never been addressed. The field of investigation thus still lies wide open, with the archives at the Fondation Folon as the main lead. On the one hand, being the first is a luxury, on the other it poses the challenge of limitation. The aim of this dissertation is therefore twofold. Firstly, Folon’s peculiar personal relationship with architecture and the architectural profession is revealed, arguing that architecture is a major incentive behind the artist’s career, whilst examining his views on architecture through the archival research conducted at the Fondation Folon. This will reveal that next to his identity as an artist, Folon carried with him a second, more hidden identity as an architect. Secondly, a selection of works is examined from an architectural perspective. All works selected testify of a relationship with a specific architectural context, whether that is an architect, a built project, a publication or something else. The comparative cases explore the work of Henri Lefebvre, Saul Steinberg, Ayn Rand, Madelon Vriesendorp, Jacques Tati and Bernard Lassus. Since this is the first piece of writing to be written on the topic of Folon and architecture, the selected works are used as a framework and as a necessary boundary. Together, these associations with the existing canon of architectural history frame the bigger picture of Folon’s (critique of) architecture.

All works discussed here are dated between 1966 and 1986. This means that the historical context of this analysis is that of late modernism, modernist critique and the postmodern turn. The geographical focus is France, although, in the footsteps of Folon, a necessary excursion to New York is also made. France knew rapid modernization and industrialization in the years after the Second World War. With the rise of heavy industries and the consequential migration from the countryside to the industrial and economic centres, the housing crisis, induced by bomb damage and lack of real estate development during the war, became acute. Consequently, numerous large scale collective housing projects were rolled out on the outskirts of France’s metropolitan areas in the 1950s. These projects, also known as Grands Ensembles, referred to the ideas of the pre-war Modern Movement and the Athens Charter. Quickly however, concerns were raised about the dehumanizing consequences of large-scale building culture. Therefore, although the Grands Ensembles remained the primary form of housing construction during the 1960s and 1970s, their architectural and urban qualities were constantly re-evaluated as the importance of humanism and sociology intensified.[3] Regardless, the substantial scale, monotony and rationality of the Grands Ensembles remained the urban paradigm for more than two decades, until they were finally rejected in the midst of the 1970s. Folon often depicted these modern cityscapes – their beauty as well as their alienation – in his artistic oeuvre. The critical themes this dissertation thus touches upon are the “americanisation” of France in the 1960s and 1970s, the social and mental consequences of large-scale modernist urbanisation, the consequential rise in critique of modernism and its rationality and uniformity, as well as the emergence of 20th century starchitecture. 

When analysing Folon’s oeuvre against its historical architectural context, it becomes clear that his works manage to grasp the ambivalences – the ideals, as well as the concerns – present in the French architectural debates. An example is his 1985 mural titled La Porte, which was painted on a Grands Ensembles building block in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris (figure 1). The building block was part of a large scale regeneration project in the 1960s and 1970s, titled Italie13. Although Folon often critiqued the alienating effects of large-scale modernist building culture in the works he produced – such as in his covers for The New Yorker – the mural illustrates the discrepancies in Folon’s architectural critique, as, in reality, it embodies the atmosphere of the Grands Ensemblesand does not compensate, but rather seems to reinforce the alienating effects of the built environment to which it is applied. In fact, the enormous door seems to replicate the Grands Ensembles’ own megalomania, functioning almost as a billboard for commuters coming from the south, visible from afar. As previously discussed, the ideals of the Grands Ensembles projects were not rejected until well into the 1970s, rather concerns were raised about their psychological and sociological impact, and attention to these issues rose early on. The public opinion rather accepted these new ways of living, whilst also critically evaluating their sociological consequences. It is exactly these public concerns that Folon managed to visualize in his art, without rejecting the fundamental ideals of high-rise modern building culture, representing the ambivalences present in the public debates. 

This thesis starts with the emphasis on the fact that Folon was not an architect. But, as this analysis has shown, in a different way, he was. He did not like the type of architecture he saw being constructed in France in the decades after the war, so, disappointed in the state of the architecture of his time, he decided that he did not want to be a contributor. Alternatively, he became an architect outside of the discipline of architecture, producing work which was emblematic for the architectural debates of his time and geographical context. He thus carried with him a second identity, an architectural one, next to his artistic one. It is this architectural identity that resurfaces in many forms in his oeuvre, as well as in his personal life.